Back in my younger days, I was a tennis bum.
Tennis kept me in school at a time when I drove numerous teachers nuts by missing as many days as possible.
The three seasons I played tennis at Tumwater High School were memorable — not necessarily for the wins, as I was always a better practice player than match player — but for all the intangibles.
Our coach, Lionel Barona, an easy-going Hawaiian who could beat every single one of us at any sport, ran our butts off during practice.
It was his way of maintaining control over a thirty-player team which he had to largely run by himself, only getting a former player to return as an unpaid assistant my senior season.
During those three years, I spent much of my time on the court.
I lived for practice, with the drills and inter-squad matches, played in summer tournaments and enjoyed my time immensely.
Especially when I spent five hours on a burning hot cement court slugging it out and bickering over line calls with my soon-to-be-estranged doubles partner, Ari Halpern, for a trophy I still have.
I played #1 singles once, at North Mason, and got my butt kicked by a foreign exchange player.
Back in town, playing Capitol, the rich school which sat just down the road from Tumwater, I played another foreign exchange student and almost started a riot.
Sure that his frequent bursts of foreign words were riddled with profanities, especially when he would punctuate his explosion by pointing at me and wagging his finger, I began to shout back at him.
As the words flew back and forth and we both tried to hit each other repeatedly in the head with the ball, suddenly our match became the one to watch.
Which is saying something, since the one thing THS tennis players never did was watch each other play. Most everyone on our squad loved to play tennis, but there was nothing as boring as watching other people play the sport.
With players from both sides hanging on the fence, I threatened to start an international incident with someone who could have — though I seriously doubt it — been loudly congratulating me on hitting a well-placed shot.
If I could have played on a regular basis with the fury and precision I displayed that afternoon, I would have been fighting for the top slot on the roster. Emerging with a rare victory and a parting shot of the two or three Norwegian cuss words I knew, I was a conquering hero for a good seven minutes.
All too often, though, I would feel sorry for my opponents and couldn’t summon the killer instinct in matches that I was able to display on a semi-regular basis in practice.
Which was fine, because with the exception of the incredibly-driven Darryl Pfaff, who we often tried to hit during practice — he would take an overhead to the groin, flex his chest and dare us to do it again and we were happy to oblige — none of us were going anywhere with our tennis games.
Without that pressure, the majority of the team was free to spend our time getting into mischief and trying to hit balls off the trucks which rumbled past our courts.
Which gave Mr. Barona reason to run our butts off again.
The topper came on our annual pilgrimage to Aberdeen, the town that would shortly thereafter come to be known to the world as the city that gave us Kurt Cobain and Nirvana.
At the time, it was merely the Town That Hope Went To When It Wanted to Die.
Actually, it’s still that…
The bus ride from Tumwater to Aberdeen was the longest one we took each season, other than the trek to Hoquiam, where they had open sewage running past the tennis courts.
Aberdeen had built their tennis courts high on a hill, which forced an already cranky, tired team to trudge up several flights of stairs before we could even begin playing.
Once at the top, we discovered the source of the smell which had been wafting its way down to us with each step. Some rocket scientist had poured gasoline all over their cracked cement courts, and a stench was slowly releasing from below.
As we started to play, the tennis balls progressively got grittier and puffed up with gasoline and dirt. In the spring afternoon, the haze of gasoline could be seen shimmering in multicolored waves.
Then the rocks started.
Junior high kids would storm up the hill and pelt us non-stop. Since Mr. Barona was way on the other side, happily watching Darryl play on the one court which seemed to have been spared from the gas, we took it upon ourselves to storm down the hill, beating the ruffians around the head with our tennis rackets.
This went on for ten hours…
The match finally done, thirty groggy, gassed-out-of-their-mind, covered in grass, dirt and scrapes, players climbed on a bus and made the trip to Aberdeen’s answer to fine dining — McDonald’s — while Mr. Barona and an adventurous/brown noser player or two went to the fish place next door.
Hamburgers and fries having partially soaked up the gasoline in our systems, the majority of the team was back on the bus when one or two of us began to get into a verbal altercation with some local football players.
Words were exchanged. People threatened to stick tennis rackets up someplace where they weren’t invited. The usual, until one local rammed his car into the front of our bus.
Our parked bus.
Having dented the front of their car and thoroughly ruffled our bus driver, who had been a man of few words until this moment — and now showcased an ability to string together cuss words in great, greasy gobs — the Aberdeen brain trust sped away.
Exiting the fish establishment, Mr. Barona let out a deep sigh, pulled his cap down low and promptly went to sleep. The bus driver continued his tirade most of the way back.
Our principal, a sleazy gent, sided with the unknown Aberdeen players and made us jam 30 players into a “short bus” for our next couple of trips out of town. He figured the grief we would get for this would be our punishment.
Other schools found it hilarious, especially when we traveled to a private academy where all their players drove cars worth more than our entire school.
We laughed last, “liberating” the fancy welcome rug which sat outside their school.
We ran a lot after that.
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